- 1MillionBot has won the tender for the Automated Attention and Information Service (SAI). Virtual assistant or chatbot of the University of Granada, a comprehensive proposal for attention and information to the public with three interconnected components: organizational, technological and service.
– This is one of the most important tenders in this area among those carried out to date.
The UGR is immersed in the Digital Transformation of the university and one of its objectives is to modernize management and improve user care. With this purpose, the Office of the Vice President for Institutional Policy of the University of Granada promoted a collaborative project aimed at modernizing care for users, a comprehensive proposal for care and information for the public, with three interconnected components: an organizational component, a technological component, and a service component.
This project pursues the achievement of one of the objectives established in the 2021-2025 Public Administration Digitization Plan, published by the Government of Spain as a development of the "Digital Spain 2025 Strategy": "Facilitate access to digital public services through the development of a personalized, proactive and omnichannel service model for citizens, especially aimed at students, which also allows an increase in the variety of channels (virtual assistants, social networks, mail, etc.) and value-added services in each one of them”.
One of the planned actions was aimed at incorporating new information channels,
being the conversational assistant one of them.
The University of Granada is a highly complex, multi-campus and multi-service institution, with a large number of decentralized services and activities focused on different interest groups (students, future students, families, graduates, citizens in general, teaching and research staff, administration and service staff, companies, other institutions and universities or partner organizations). The web ecosystem of the University of Granada, made up of a large number of Web pages, generates a very heterogeneous environment with a large amount of information and data,
very difficult to locate in certain cases if the structure of the institution is not known.
The virtual assistant represents a new service model for users and this project seeks to mitigate this weakness, establishing a homogeneous, coordinated knowledge base, replicated throughout the Web ecosystem and ordered by help topics according to the user profile. The automated service and information system will be a tool that is limited exclusively to the knowledge base.
The development of the virtual assistant that 1MillionBot will carry out will be based on artificial intelligence, machine learning and NLP (Natural Language Processing) or NLU (Natural Language Understanding) natural language recognition techniques, and will have a double objective:
- Automate the response to repetitive queries or questions by the different
interest groups, and especially the future and current student body. - Direct queries that require a specialist to the correct service, through the
connection with the ticketing system.
About the University of Granada
The University of Granada (UGR), is according to various international academic rankings a leading research center in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI).
International academic rankings, such as that of Shanghai Jiao Tang University in 2021, places the UGR ranked 101 in the world in computer engineering. And the Times Higher Education, of 2017 positioned her as the fifth institution in the world for the impact of citations on artificial intelligence research, a list topped by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Other rankings such as edurank that performs a classification based on its research performance in Artificial Intelligence (AI) places it as number 1 in Spain, 21 in Europe and 115 in the world.
Doctors trained at the UGR are spread over the universities of Nottingham, Ghent, Leicester, Paris and several in Sweden. Since the rise of the practical application of artificial intelligence, the projects with companies that the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the UGR has taken charge of have only increased. Among the companies with which they currently work are Repsol, Indra, Telefónica, Puleva, Heineken or Sherpa.